Ninety-first edition of the N&O column / Spooks newsletter

(Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2005 16:00:53 +0000)

Intelligence news

Italy

Italy's Interior Minister Pisanu said at the inauguration of the Academic Year at SISDE that it is time for a change. Italy should change its intelligence organization. Pisanu stated "One single intelligence unit, to be controlled directly by the Cabinet, appropriately structured, would be far more efficient, and remove many problems". "Such activity is characterized by a due operational unity. It's a circular process, which cannot have rigid perimeters".

(Source: AGI SpA)

USA

Fact or fiction???

Check the the full article on
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/01/14/1105582700951.html

A US plan to develop a bad breath bomb, a weapon that caused "severe and lasting halitosis" to make it easier to sniff out spies. Nice huh? What do you think of a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other? These facts have been revealed in newly declassified documents, according to the website.

Burma

Burmese military junta, State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) has reappointed some of the military intelligence (MI) officers who were fired from their jobs in the Military Intelligence Service (MIS).

Some of them were reinstated to their original jobs and the majority of them are ranked below the position of sergeant and they have been ordered to watch over the political communities in Rangoon, according to sources close to the Burmese military HQs in Rangoon.

(Source: DVB)

Germany / Russia

About 130 Russian spies are currently working undercover in Germany, almost as many as were deployed there by the KGB during the Cold War, according to the latest edition of the German news magazine Focus.

German political parties, companies, the armed forces and scientific research establishments have been targeted by post-communist Russian espionage, said the report quoting German authorities.

The article, released in advance of Monday’s edition, quoted an official of the German Bundes Kriminal Amt as saying the targets were spied on "in an extremely aggressive way". It also quoted an unnamed senior official of Germany’s domestic counter-intelligence service as saying Russian intelligence had been strongly reinforced, so that almost as many operatives were now undercover on German territory as Soviet KGB agents during the Cold War.

(Source: AFP)